They seem to have consumers trained to think Stainless Steel is as valuable as gold. I used to work at the place that brokered metals. Aluminum is maybe $$0.75 per pound and Stainless is about double that. But there would be nothing even close to a pound of metal in a phone, not even a 1/10 of a pound.. A tenth of a pound of stainless costs about 17 cents.
Not to argue with you (much) -
steel, generically, is not anything like a precious metal. But, where gold and aluminum are themselves elements (though when used in things like watches and phones, both are in the form of alloys with other metals), there is no such thing as "steel atoms" - steel is made of iron and other elements, and some crazy amounts of effort, over the centuries, have gone into working out the very best steel alloys for various purposes. Some of the better steels can be
quite expensive, and, perhaps more germane here, some varieties can be tremendously hard to machine (mill/lathe/grind into a specific shape). I know of people who do
very precise CNC machining (similar to what Apple does though in other fields) on steel, titanium, tungsten and other metals, who have to figure the cost of tool bits that will wear out and/or break, into the cost of the finished part, and this per-unit machining overhead can be quite substantial. If you have a tool bit that costs $50 all by itself, used for just one of your machining steps, and you find you're wearing out one of these for every 6 parts you manufacture, it really adds up. (And aluminum is MUCH easier to machine than steel.)
Counting only the raw cost of "steel' (without any attention paid to alloy or grade) for phone or watch cases, is sort of in the same ballpark as the reports that come out every year citing how the "raw parts cost" of an iPhone is estimated to be $100 or $200 or whatever - it's interesting info in and of itself, but then entirely too many people extrapolate poorly from that into "Apple is ripping me off, the iPhone only cost them $100 and they're making $700 profit off of it". No, they aren't. Oh, don't worry, Apple is making plenty of money, but making an iPhone is far more costly than pouring $100 worth of raw parts into a cardboard box and sending it out the door.
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Mythical liquid metal iPhone.
And every once in a while it morphs into a police officer and asks, "
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?"
